Living in greater fear

Andrew Gilligan, BBC News, Baghdad

12:01AM BST 20 Apr 2003

I am surprised at your criticism of what seems to us all here in Baghdad, Iraqis and media alike, a statement of the obvious - that in the days after Saddam Hussein's fall, the people of Baghdad were living in greater fear than they had ever known (Opinion & Leading article, April 13).

Saddam certainly did perform random acts of cruelty, and all Iraqis certainly lived in fear of him. But you usually, if not always, had to come to his attention in some way to fall victim. Saddam did not normally stop you on the street, drag you out of your car, beat and rob you; Saddam did not normally break into your home with 45 drunken friends and attempt to rape your daughter; and you did not have to sit on your front porch all night with a Kalashnikov to keep Saddam away. This is the reality that Iraqis lived for the first days of their liberation. For most of them it was unprecedented and terrifying; for at least several dozen, it was fatal. Your leader-writer and columnist Nigel Farndale must enjoy unusual powers of perception to have discerned the facts to be otherwise from several thousand miles away.

It is quite untrue to describe any of us here as insufficiently questioning of Iraq. Any fair reading of the record shows that at some risk to ourselves, we were consistently sceptical about Iraqi claims, robust in interviews with regime figures (Naji Sabri, the former foreign minister, walked out of one of mine) and, towards the end, were openly amused at the information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Both I and my BBC colleague Rageh Omaar were threatened with expulsion.

If only the same robustness and scepticism could have been employed towards many of the untrustworthy, premature or downright false claims made by the US and Britain - such as the "uprising" in Basra, the "fall" of Umm Qasr, the "discovery" of a chemical weapons plant, and the "execution" of British prisoners.